“Oh. No.” Mavis clutched Belle tighter. “This was Ammy? The woman he’s been seeing? We never turned the screen on today, never heard. Roarke just told us you’d caught a case, a cop killer. We didn’t know it was . . . Oh, Leonardo.”
He put his arm around her, drew both his girls closer. “This is . . . horrible. We ran into them at a club one night, sat down with them. You could see how much they . . . It was there between them,” Leonardo said with sorrow in his gilted eyes. “I’m so sorry, so sorry. Is there anything we can do for him?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“We only met her that one time.” A tear slid down Mavis’s cheek before she pressed it to the top of Belle’s head. “She seemed so up, and they were so into each other. Total vibe, total sparkage. Remember, honey-pot, how I said after they were just gone squared over each other.”
“I remember.”
“It’s good it’s you.” Mavis firmed her chin, patted Belle’s back. “You’ll find the bastard who did it. Morris knows that. We’re going to leave so you can do the cop stuff. If there’s anything—you know, stuff I know how to do—you just tag me. I’m there.”
They began to transfer Belle into her carrier as Summerset walked in with a tray. “You’re leaving.”
“Bellissimo needs to go night-night.” Mavis rose on her rainbow tip-toes to kiss Summerset’s cheek. “We’ll be back—us girls—for the big bash. A bridal shower and all that girl stuff’s just what we all need. And you guys.” She elbowed her husband. “Zipping off to Vegas for the man party.”
“Vegas?” Eve blinked. “Huh?”
“My duties as best man,” Roarke told her. “I’m looking forward to it.”
When she was alone with Roarke, the wine, and an elegantly arranged plate of food, she frowned. “Why do you have to go all the way to Las Vegas—shit, you do mean Las Vegas, right? You’re not going off planet to Vegas II.”
“No, we’re going to the original.”
“But, what if I need help with all those women? I don’t even know what they’re planning because Peabody and Nadine are doing all that, so what if—”
“You could easily find out the plans instead of pretending it won’t actually happen. And you’ll be just fine. They’re your friends.” He tapped her chin with a fingertip. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold.”
“I’m going to take it up, eat at my desk.”
“Fine. Then you can tell me what happened to Morris’s lady, and what I can do to help you find her killer. He’s my friend, too,” Roarke added.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” She gave in for a moment, moved into him, dropped her forehead on his shoulder. “God. Oh, God, it was horrible. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It made me sick inside, just sick to knock on his door. To know I was about to break a friend in two. I have to find the answers for him. It’s more than the job.”
“It is, yes.” He held her close and tight, and as Mavis had with Belle, rested his cheek on her head. Battled back his own fears. “Whatever you need from me.”
She nodded, drew back. “Let’s take it upstairs. It always helps me see things clearer, or from other angles, when I run the case by you.”
They started up. “Tell me a little about her first. Did you know her well?”
“No. I ran into her a couple of times at the morgue. She transferred here a few months ago. From Atlanta. Mavis had it—the vibe thing. He was in love with her, Roarke, and with everything I’ve learned since this morning, she felt the same about him. I get that she was a good cop, detail-oriented. She didn’t live the job.” She glanced over at him. “I guess you get what I mean by that.”
He smiled a little. “I do.”
“Organized, feminine. She had eight years on the job. No big flash in her jacket, no big lows. Steady. People liked her, a lot. Her squad, her main weasel, hell, the woman who owns the Chinese place where she ordered her takeout. I can’t figure out what she did, who she twisted, to be targeted like this.”
“It was target specific?”
“Yeah.” In her office, she sat behind her desk, told him the details while she ate.
“The locks were checked for tampering?”
“Yeah, and they say no. Could’ve used a master, could be another tenant in the same building. Could have managed to dupe her key card, or someone else’s in the building. Or he could be as good as you, and didn’t leave a trace.”
“She was taken down with a stunner,” Roarke mused. “They’re not easy to come by, and very pricey. Could he have disarmed her first and used her own weapon both times?”
“It doesn’t play. No defensive wounds, and other than the kill burns, and the bumps on the back of her head, her shoulder blades, no offensive wounds. No cop turns over her weapon like that, not even to someone she knows.”
“You’d give yours to me,” he pointed out. “If I asked to see it for a moment, you’d give it to me.”
Eve considered that. “Okay, maybe she would, to someone she was really tight with. But it still doesn’t stream that way for me. She was heading out, sidearm and clutch piece. Taking the stairs, because she always did. That’s a setup. And it had to be done fast and smooth. No time to ask her nice if she’d let you hold her stunner.”
She pushed up, began to pace. After, Roarke noted, she’d eaten only half her meal. “We ran all the tenants. Got a few criminal pops, but nothing major. We’ll interview everyone again who came up with any sort of a sheet, but I have to ask myself why she’d be going out, armed, to meet one of her neighbors.”
“She might have been using the stairs simply to get to one of the other floors rather than the exit.”
Eve stopped, frowned. “Okay, that’s a thought. She arms herself first, though, so it’s not a neighborly visit. It wouldn’t be smart, going to another apartment for a meet when it’s on the shady. Then why did the killer, if he’s inside, need to jam the rear door security camera? Maybe to throw us off,” she said, answering herself. “So we’re looking outside the building.”
She paced again. “Unnecessary complication. But we’ll interview the tenants again. It just feels like an extra step to take, when SOP would be to run and interview everyone anyway.”
“I can help with the electronics.”
“That’s Feeney’s call. He’s always happy to have the uber e-geek on board, but he may have it well under control. I’ve got a lot of case files to wade through. I need to study her currents, her closed, her open, and what I got from Atlanta. You can—yeah, yeah, it’s an insult to you—but you can think like a cop. Maybe you can take a look at Atlanta while I do New York. Plus, they need to be cross-referenced. I need to know if anything from before connects with now.”
“And I can do that faster than you.”
“Yeah, you can.” She angled her head. “You can also think like a criminal, which is handy. Would you have sent her weapons to the primary? Why or why not?”
“I wouldn’t have taken them in the first place. A smart criminal takes nothing—unless it’s straight thievery, which this wasn’t—and leaves nothing of himself behind. Otherwise, there’s that connection.”
“But he did take them. And I don’t think he’s stupid.”
“They must have served a purpose. Leaving them—especially if he used one to kill her—would be, in my opinion, more of an insult to her. And you, or whoever caught the case. So taking them served another purpose, even if it was just the jab to you by sending them back. He’s not a pro.”
“Because?”
“A pro does the job, walks away, moves on. He doesn’t taunt the police.”
“Agreed. He might be a professional criminal, but it wasn’t a professional hit. It looks simple, on the surface, but it was actually much too elaborate—and too personal—for a straight hit. A straight hit, you don’t take her in a populated building, but lure her out of it, maybe to a meet. Take her there, or along the way. He wanted something, information or something she might have taken with her we can’t know about. Or he wanted to give her a message before he finished her. And he wanted her found without much delay.